If you’ve ever pondered the question “what is the most points a player with no basketball skills could so score in an NBA game?”, well, tonight you are slightly closer to an answer. The lower bound for that number is 20, because we just saw “NBA player” Damian Jones score that many tonight.
Now that I’ve gotten my zinger in on Jones (and I really zinged him good, didn’t I), I can say that I’m impressed with his ability to dunk in many scenarios. All of those scenarios are rather close to the basket, and his offensive “range” ends as soon as steps away from arm’s reach of the rim, but man, he can really slam. He’s already looking straight at the rim before the defense even knows what’s going on. Lots of people only look at raw vertical numbers (and those are cool, Luke Babbitt had some of the best of all time at the draft combine), but what seems to be more important is how quick you can get up there. Jones is one of those players who can seemingly jump from any position to dunk it, barely any gather required.
Of course, all of that doesn’t really qualify as a “basketball skill” in the traditional sense. When it comes to “fundamentals”, Jones is severely lacking, but maybe fundamentals aren’t all that important in the NBA when a guy who has none of them can come in and score 20 points like it’s no big deal (and if he has a point guard like Trae Young who never stops throwing lobs).